


tilt the axis of the world

by cosmic_llin



Category: The Worst Witch (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/F, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 10:01:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14713964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_llin/pseuds/cosmic_llin
Summary: Cackle's Academy is shrouded in ice, and Hecate Hardbroom will go to almost any lengths to get Ada back.





	tilt the axis of the world

**Author's Note:**

> This is set immediately following an alternate version of _The Big Freeze_ in which Miss Mould really had destroyed the Founding Stone.

She doesn’t recall much about that day afterwards.

She knows she kicked and struggled in Dimity’s firm hold, demanded, then begged, to be allowed to go back.

‘Hecate, _Hecate_!’she remembersDimity saying. ‘If you can tell me you have a plan, I’ll let you go.’

She didn’t have a plan, didn’t have a thought in her head past running back to the lab, where she’d abandoned Ada, Felicity, Enid and Maud. But the ice was already at her feet, the stone was already destroyed. It was too late, and Dimity wouldn’t let go, and Hecate was too weak to fight her.

After that there’s just a long blank in her memory, although they tell her she took charge, notifying the relevant authorities, securing temporary accommodation for whoever couldn’t return home immediately, informing the lost girls’ families.

The inquiry in the following weeks came to the conclusion that she did nothing wrong, but Hecate knows that isn’t true. Because it was her job to keep them all safe, and she couldn’t.

And now, not so many weeks after that, Ada’s girls that she was so proud of, the members of the community that she built, are scattered to the four winds, gone to whatever schools could take them at short notice. Most of the teachers are gone too.

Pippa offered Hecate a place without hesitation, whether to teach or just to live, but her heart is too badly hurt to accept. Seeing Ada’s former pupils settling in - Pippa took more than she had room for really, on scholarships, most of them - would be like opening the wound afresh every day. At least she knows that Pippa will do right by them, in her own way. She finds herself wondering often how Mildred is managing without Maud and Enid.

Hecate stares into the fire, thinks about how proud and happy Ada was at her birthday show, how loved she felt up on that stage. The youngest girls hadn’t even been there a term. By the time they leave their new schools, they’ll probably have all but forgotten that they were ever Cackle’s girls at all.

That’s how easy it is for a centuries-long legacy to die.

The door opens and Dimity comes in, taking off her hat and leaning her broomstick in the corner.

‘Hecate?’ she says. ‘Have you moved from that spot since I left this morning?’

It’s only then that Hecate realises her muscles are stiff from sitting curled in on herself.

Dimity shakes her head. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Up.’

She doesn’t want to, but this is part of the routine now, so she drops the blanket from around her shoulders without complaint, pushes herself off the sofa, and puts on her cloak for a walk around the block.

Dimity found the flat and invited Hecate to live with her when it became apparent that if she didn’t, Hecate would just sit in the woods until the trees claimed her. She flies into her new job at a school nearby each day. Hecate has lived frugally enough that at least she doesn’t have to think about employment for a while, but it makes the days long and slow and shapeless. Their early evening walk gives her life some structure, even if she resents having to move her limbs under the mocking sun.

‘I think it would be good for you to find something to do during the days,’ says Dimity, as they make their way down the street.

‘I don’t want to do anything,’ Hecate says.

‘I know,’ says Dimity. ‘I know that I can’t truly understand what you’ve lost, and it’s going to take time to get through this. But I also don’t think Ada would want you to sit by yourself doing nothing, day after day.’

Anger flickers, briefly. Hecate wants to slap Dimity, tell her she has no idea what Ada would have wanted. But she’s right. 

‘You know,’ she says instead, ‘you remind me of her, a little.’

Dimity stops in her tracks, turns to Hecate, her face solemn. ‘That might be the highest compliment anyone has ever given me,’ she says.

Hecate doesn’t know how to respond to that, so she just nods, and starts walking again. Dimity follows.

* * *

That night she can’t sleep. A regular occurrence these days, but tonight it’s particularly bad and nothing seems to help, not even the heavy-duty sleep potion that usually does the trick. It just makes her foggy, leaves her drifting in and out of painful memories without escape, and she forces herself awake enough to cast a spell to cancel it out. 

Back home, whenever she couldn’t sleep, she would listen to Ada’s quiet breathing and try to match it with her own. On the nights that they had gone to bed separately, she would creep through the door that led between their rooms - it had taken a complicated spell to join together rooms on different corridors, but it had been more than worth it - and slide into bed beside her, and even if Ada was fast asleep, she would move closer to Hecate and make a sleepy noise of greeting.

Instead, Hecate lies in her cold bed alone with her thoughts, until she drifts off sometime in the light of early morning, and wakes up again to the sound of the door closing as Dimity leaves for work. She’s so tired that her head swims, but she wakes with a clarity of purpose that she hasn’t felt in a while. She gets up, dresses, and prepares to leave the flat.

She knows she shouldn’t go - it can’t do anything but make her feel worse. But she picks up her broomstick anyway.

When she arrives at the viewpoint - a clifftop clearing that was a popular picnic spot for the girls in the summer months - someone else is already there, sitting on a long, flat rock. Hecate lands her broom quietly and approaches.

‘I see your time at Miss Pentangle’s Academy hasn’t improved your ability to follow rules, Mildred Hubble,’ she says. ‘Shouldn’t you be in lessons?’

She can’t make herself sound as scathing as she ought to. Mildred just smiles sadly and shuffles to make room on the rock. After a moment, Hecate sits down beside her.

‘Miss Pentangle’s been really nice to us,’ Mildred says. ‘She understands that we’re sad sometimes.’

‘I’m glad she’s taking good care of you all,’ says Hecate.

‘It’s not the same,’ Mildred says. ‘Miss Pentangle’s great, the school’s great... but it’s not Cackle’s.’

They both look at the castle in the distance. It stands out white against the landscape, the ice thick, spread in a circle around it. It stopped eventually, when the magic ran out. No witch will risk getting close to it for decades yet.

Ada’s in there, with Felicity and Enid and Maud. Their last thought was that Hecate would find a way to save them.

‘You must have been angry with me,’ she says, ‘that I escaped myself, rather than send one of your friends out.’

Mildred shrugs. ‘I don’t really know much about what happened, except what you said at the inquiry,’ she says, ‘but it sounds like you made the best decision you could. If you’d saved one of them, the other would still be there, and it still would have been horrible. At least you tried to fix things.’ She sighs heavily. ‘I just wish we could… I dunno… go back in time and change it, stop this before it started. Isn’t there a spell for that?’

‘No,’ says Hecate. ‘I’m sorry.’

But that’s not exactly true.

Intentionally changing the past is so difficult as to be almost impossible, and besides which, it’s strongly prohibited by the Code, and punishable by the severest penalties. But if, _if_ you could do it, and get it right, then nobody would ever find out.

Hecate sends Mildred back to school, and heads to the library.

* * *

It’s been years since she last visited the Magic Council’s Grand Archive. With the extensive library at Cackle’s, she rarely needed to go anywhere else for books. But she spent time here as a student and it still feels reassuringly familiar. Small details have changed, but she knows the way from the entrance to the main hall, knows which shelves will have the books she needs.

‘Miss Hardbroom?’ 

A young woman in the neat archivists’ uniform is standing nearby. Hecate frowns. She recognises her. One of their girls - she must have graduated ten or eleven years ago.

‘Emerald Hawthorne,’ she says.

Emerald smiles. ‘You remember me!’

Hecate nods. It’s rare she forgets a student who attended her classes.

‘We were all so sad to hear about Miss Cackle and the school,’ Emerald says. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Thank you,’ says Hecate awkwardly. ‘I… didn’t realise you were working here.’

‘For five years now,’ Emerald says. ‘I’m known for my careful record keeping. I don’t know if you recall the time I mislabelled a jar of wasp stings in your class? You gave me detention and made me spend it reorganising your entire supply cupboard.’

‘I certainly do recall,’ Hecate says.

‘And that was the last time I was ever lazy about labelling,’ says Emerald. ‘Are you looking for something in particular? Can I help?’

Hecate shakes her head. ‘I know my way. Thank you, Emerald.’

She watches the young woman go, and almost smiles. The school may be gone, but there are hundreds of women out there carrying a little invisible piece of it through their lives. Ada would have liked that.

Hecate makes her way to the section with the books on time travel. She’s not naive enough to think she’ll find a manual with step-by-step instructions - these kinds of spells are illegal, after all. But if she looks hard enough, gathers the clues from all the old books, perhaps there’ll be something she can use.

She determinedly doesn’t think about the fact that what she’s contemplating is a crime. Just looking in books isn’t a crime. Taking notes isn’t a crime. Once she has the information, then she’ll decide what to do with it. It’s much too early to worry about that now.

* * *

She’s right about the books. It takes three days of solid searching before she finds a mention of the sort of thing she’d be attempting, and even that is only a vague allusion. But it leads her to the next one, and the next, like a trail of breadcrumbs, and now she gets out of bed every day only an hour or two after Dimity leaves, dresses smartly, heads to the library and spends most of the day there before returning. Every few days she sees Emerald, who always stops to say hello. A few of the other archivists become familiar too, and she finds herself nodding politely in response to their cheery greetings.

It’s a relief to be filling the endless days with something. Dimity notices the difference in her, comments on how much better she’s doing, even though all Hecate tells her is that she’s visiting the library for research. 

Hecate finds herself returning from the Archive each day fizzing with energy that seeks an outlet, so she starts to cook.

Cooking is a little like potion-making. She likes the precision of following a recipe, the calm space it makes in her thoughts. After a day in the Archive it helps to focus on something else, and Dimity is always glad to have a proper meal after a day’s hard work.

They eat, they talk, they clear up together, and Hecate goes to bed knowing that the next day she might find something that brings her closer to Ada. The bed is still cold, but she sleeps a little better.

* * *

Her research takes her regularly to the Archive, and sometimes to more obscure libraries and antique bookshops (both magical ones and otherwise). With painful slowness, she gathers the knowledge she needs.

There’s a potion. She pieces the recipe together from dozens of sources, so who’s to say which is right about how, or whether, it works? She’ll have no way to test it. There will only be one chance, if she can even obtain the rarer ingredients.

The potion is complicated and time-consuming to brew, but if she can do it correctly, it should send her back in time. One of the more detailed books she finds suggests that, even if it works, she’ll have a few minutes at the most before time snaps her back to her original location - especially since her destination is getting further and further into the past with every day. And there’s no way to precisely target where she’ll end up - the spell may work, but she may be a day or a week too late.

And if she manages to change the past, this timeline and everything in it, including her, will disappear. The moment she changes things enough to make a different future, she’ll never have existed. 

It’s not impossible that she might change something but not enough, destroying this timeline only to start one just as bad, or even worse. She won’t even get to know.

Still, it’s the best option she has. She sets about slowly gathering the ingredients, starting with the most readily available, and continues her research. 

The spell requires so much power that most of the components need charging separately before the main spellwork can begin. Hecate works at it gradually in the late evenings after Dimity has gone to bed, releasing her magical energy into every herb and root, saving a little each time for the cauldron in which she’ll brew the potion.

A little voice keeps reminding her that this goes against the Code, against everything she’s supposed to believe in. She can’t shut it out entirely, but she can ignore it, and she does. After all, she hasn’t actually _done_ anything yet. She can still change her mind.

* * *

One late afternoon, Hecate transfers home from the library, arriving in the hallway. There’s a sound coming from the living room. She listens.

Dimity is crying.

Hecate walks softly closer, peers in. Dimity is sitting on the floor, in front of the coffee table. She’s trying to do some marking, but she’s sobbing so hard that she can hardly keep hold of her pen. 

She’s been so practical and supportive throughout this whole ordeal that Hecate forgets sometimes how much she lost herself.

She’s never seen Dimity cry before. Dimity’s not a crier, not like Ada who was never afraid for people to see her emotions. Dimity’s a little like Hecate, she tries to put on a brave face - even if the form it takes is very different. Hecate hovers, torn. Dimity hasn’t seen her yet, and she’s not sure that what comfort she could offer would be welcome. For a moment she thinks she’ll go forward, sit beside her, but then she thinks better of it, transfers away.

She only goes as far as the end of the road, where there’s a pizza shop Dimity likes. Mercifully it’s still early enough that there’s no queue, so she orders their usual, waits the ten minutes for them to make it, and then walks home with the warm boxes in her arms. She lets herself in through the door, making sure to close it loudly behind her.

‘Hecate?’ calls Dimity. ‘Is that you?’

‘Yes,’ Hecate calls. She takes her time, laying the pizza boxes on the side table and hanging up her cloak. Enough time for Dimity to cast a little charm to hide the evidence of puffy eyes and tear-stained cheeks, if she wants to. Then she picks the boxes up and enters.

Dimity’s just sitting and marking, like nothing’s wrong.

‘I thought perhaps we should… treat ourselves,’ Hecate says, holding out the pizza.

‘HB, you’re a genius!’ Dimity says, no trace of sadness in her smile. ‘Hang on, let me make some space. I’ve definitely done enough to take a break.’

She piles the papers out of the way, and Hecate brings the boxes to the table. She summons napkins and condiments from the kitchen, and a knife and fork for herself. And then she sits on the floor and eats pizza and they talk about their days, and the new broom Dimity’s thinking of getting, and the nice weather they’ve been having, and the merits of cheesy garlic bread versus plain. 

And it isn’t as though there’s not still an icy fist around Hecate’s heart, squeezing so hard she can hardly breathe, but for a while it’s a little easier to pretend to forget it.

* * *

Hecate’s made an important discovery. There’s a shield potion that will protect her and any objects on her person from the effects of the magical ice around the castle. It’s complex and time-consuming to make - almost as complex as the time travel potion - but it’s not actually illegal, so instead of diverting her energies, Hecate spends nearly all of her remaining savings paying for a discreet potion maker with an impeccable reputation to brew it for her. 

It won’t last forever, but it will be enough that she can walk right in, drink the time travel potion inside. That way, she doesn’t have to waste precious minutes getting to the castle once she’s travelled back in time. It will give her that much more of a window to find a way to set things right.

It’s worrying her that she has no way of knowing exactly when she’ll end up. She can’t make a plan - if she arrives a week before, she’ll need a completely different strategy than if she arrives minutes before. There are too many possible scenarios to plan for all of them. She’ll have to think on her feet when she gets there, and that’s not one of her strengths.

It won’t make any difference either way if she can’t find the last few ingredients. She’s exploring various avenues, but she doesn’t have a lead yet on the bottled Mists of Time she needs. It’s rare and precious, and the only person she knows of who has any is Pippa. But if she asks Pippa for it, she’ll guess instantly what Hecate wants it for. And she might try to stop her. Not with force but with gentleness, with sensible words, with sympathy.

Hecate doesn’t trust herself to keep to her course in that situation.

* * *

She goes back to the viewpoint now and then, to look at the castle in the distance while she thinks over the problem. This time, Mildred’s there again, and she’s crying.

Hecate leans her broom against a tree and sits beside her. Mildred looks up, face stained with tears.

‘I miss Enid and Maud so much,’ she gasps. ‘I dream about them all the time, trapped in there, waiting for me to rescue them. I should have figured it out, I should have done more to help…’

If there was ever a sign that Mildred Hubble is a true witch, it’s this - her unshakeable belief that she has the power to tilt the axis of the world, that it was her responsibility to fix this mess that was none of her making.

‘You did everything you could,’ says Hecate gently. ‘You’re a promising witch, Mildred, but you’re only twelve and there’s still so much you have to learn. None of this is your fault.’

Mildred hunches over, sobbing her heart out.

Ada would hug her now, if she were here. She so clearly needs it.

Hecate takes a deep breath and puts an arm around Mildred’s shoulder. She knows it’s not all it should be, not warm and enveloping like one of Ada’s hugs, but Mildred leans into her anyway, seems to take comfort from it. It’s not unpleasant.

Something occurs to Hecate. Something appalling. Something she absolutely shouldn’t do.

_A witch makes things go her way_ , she thinks.

‘Mildred,’ she says, before she can talk herself out of it, ‘I am going to ask you a favour.’

Mildred looks up, surprised. ‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘Do you know where Miss Pentangle keeps her bottled Mists of Time?’ Hecate asks.

Mildred nods. ‘It’s on a shelf in her office. I remember the bottle from when Miss Cackle got her job back.’

‘Do you think you could… borrow it, without Miss Pentangle noticing? And bring it here, this time tomorrow?’

Mildred stares at her, eyes wide. ‘What for?’

‘A… private joke,’ she says. ‘Just… a prank that Miss Pentangle and I like to play on each other. We’ll put it back, afterwards.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Mildred says.

Hecate opens her mouth to protest, but Mildred isn’t finished.

‘But if you need it,’ she says, ‘then you need it. I’ll do it.’

* * *

Hecate spends the next day pacing back and forth, wearing a furrow into the carpet in her room and agonising over the fact that she’s made a child an accessory to a potential crime. She’s supposed to protect the girls, be a good example for them - and she can’t stop thinking of Mildred as one of her students, even though she’s never going to teach her again. She’s done a terrible thing, an unworthy thing, and she’s ashamed of herself.

She wants to take it back, but she has no way of contacting Mildred to tell her not to go through with it. So the next day they meet at the viewpoint again, and Mildred fishes the bottle out of her backpack.

‘Thank you,’ Hecate breathes, taking the bottle carefully in both hands as if it’s a precious heirloom.

There’s no point lying to herself any more. She’s doing this.

She takes out the vial she’s prepared, transfers just enough of the mists into it with shaking hands, and gives the bottle back to Mildred.

‘What you’re doing…’ Mildred says. ‘I hope it works. Good luck.’

Hecate nods. Mildred’s a clever girl, it’s likely she’s put two and two together. 

Mildred replaces the bottle in her backpack, zips it up, and mounts her broom again. Hecate watches as she takes off, flies into the distance until she’s just a speck on the horizon.

She has everything she needs now.

* * *

She books a hotel room and tells Dimity she’s away seeing a friend. She can’t risk any interruptions. The potion and the accompanying chants are supposed to be performed by an entire coven, three witches at the very least, but she hopes she can supply enough power on her own. She sets up the cauldron, lays out the charged ingredients, performs a few basic spells to enhance her magic and maintain her strength throughout the process. She sets up the necessary wards and charms so that nobody in the surrounding rooms will hear or smell anything odd. She takes a few minutes to read through the instructions again and double-check she has everything she could possibly need.

She lights the flame under her cauldron.

It takes all night. Hours of painstaking work as she adds each ingredient, chants her magic into the mixture, stirs the potion as it bubbles and steams. A single mistake could ruin everything, and she’s never made this potion before. She has no way of knowing if this is how it’s supposed to look.

The potion is thick, and she stirs for so long that her shoulders ache. She chants so long that she’s hoarse, forces the sounds out through her parched throat. She walks circles around the cauldron until her feet burn with tiredness. As the night wears on, she finds herself feeling dizzy, on and off, but she can’t waste a moment to sit down and rest. She keeps pouring her magic out into the potion until she begins to fear she will run out.

But she doesn’t. The sun is beginning to rise as the colour of the potion shifts and she senses in her bones that it’s ready. She pours it into a bottle, stoppers it, and places it carefully on the desk beside the shield potion. Then she sits on the bed for a moment to catch her breath.

She wakes up hours later, aching and fuzzy. She showers to clear her head, drinks about a gallon of water, dresses, and vanishes everything she brought except the two potions. She tucks them into the pocket of her cloak, checks out, and leaves.

* * *

This is the closest she’s been to the castle since that day. From this spot near the edge of the ice, she can see where they stood, where Dimity held her back. 

Dimity has no idea she’s here. Hecate didn’t even say goodbye. She shrugs off the thought. If this works, Dimity will never know. And if it doesn’t, she’ll certainly be all right without Hecate.

Hecate takes out the bottle of shield potion, speaks the spell to activate it, drinks it. 

After a few moments, she feels the spell begin. It’s almost like being underwater. Sounds are muffled, and the sunlight feels weaker against her skin. She can’t feel the breeze anymore.

She makes for the frozen castle, pushes down her emotions as she passes into the courtyard, tries to forget about everything but her mission. She can’t afford to let sentiment distract her.

As she enters and makes her way down to her lab, walking so fast her heart pounds, she tries to tell herself that it’s just logical to perform the spell in the room where she spends so much of her time.

But it’s the thought of Ada that guides her footsteps. And it’s the sight of Ada that stops her at the threshold, makes her stagger, catching the door jamb for support. She waits there for a moment, struggling for breath. She can’t look away. Ada’s eyes are open and she’s standing with her hands clasped, as serenely as though at any moment she might start making the announcements at assembly. 

Hecate walks slowly towards her, past Maud and Enid and Felicity, each one of them a twist of guilt under her ribs.

‘Ada,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry. About everything. And I promise that, if it’s within my power, I’ll put this right.’

She reaches the ice block. After all these months apart, it seems impossibly cruel that they’re separated by barely a handspan, and Hecate still can’t touch her. She presses her palm against the block. It’s cool, but not as burning cold as she knows it would be without the shield.

Hecate leans forward, lets her forehead touch the ice. She feels as though she can almost, almost feel Ada’s heartbeat, hear her voice.

A treacherous part of her says, perhaps this is enough. Perhaps she could just stay here until the shield fails, until her magic drains away, and then if nothing else she would be with them, with Ada, like she should have been all along. These last few months have been so hard.

But that’s not how they do things at Cackle’s Academy.

_Ne’er a day will pass before us when we have not tried our best_ , quotes Ada in her head.

‘I do love you, Ada,’ Hecate whispers.

She turns around, her back to the ice block, as though Ada might catch her if she fell. She takes the bottle of potion from the pocket of her cloak, pulls out the stopper, and drinks the whole lot down.

Everything around her seems to fold in on itself, with a horrible shriek that makes her cover her ears. She has the unaccountable feeling that her blood is pumping backwards. She can’t feel her feet, and then she can’t feel her body at all, and then she can’t see or hear or sense anything except for a horrible spinning sensation that would be nauseating if she still had any grip on her physical self.

And then she’s sprawled on the floor, gasping for breath, still clutching the empty potion bottle. She looks around. She’s still in the lab, but it’s not frozen. Morning light slants through the windows.

She realises suddenly how foolish this was - she should have taken the potion in a supply cupboard or one of the lesser-used corridors or something. There’s nobody here in the lab, but it’s only luck that she didn’t interrupt herself teaching a class.

‘For goodness sake, Hecate!’ she mutters to herself, getting up.

She might only have minutes. Less. And there’s nobody here. She has to find a way to change the past, stop things from happening the way they did last time. She doesn’t even know what day it is, how long they have.

She’ll find Ada. Ada had thought she was overreacting about Miss Mould, but if she explains, makes it clear how important this is, she doesn’t doubt for a moment that Ada will listen.

She sets off towards the office, but it’s floors away, and she can’t risk transferring when her position in this moment in time is so precarious. Her legs are still shaky from the potion but she forces herself onward.

‘Miss Hardbroom?’

Mildred Hubble. She always seems to be everywhere at once. Hecate can’t let go of this chance, not when time is so short.

‘Mildred Hubble!’ Hecate says. ‘What day is it?’

‘It’s the morning of Halloween,’ Mildred says. ‘Are you all right?’

Not too late! Hecate presses a hand to her heart to try to contain its hammering.

‘Yes. I’m fine. I… listen, Mildred, this will sound strange. And perhaps nothing will come of it, now. But the Founding Stone is hidden in the topmost turret. I need you to go there and protect it until Miss Cackle or I come to relieve you. And if you see one of your friends on the way, tell them to run and tell Miss Cackle where you are, and to get there as soon as she can.’

Mildred stares at her.

‘Now!’

Mildred turns and runs. Hecate keeps going, but after a few paces her vision clouds, and she can no longer hear her own footsteps. The world begins to fade away.

This is it then. She’s changed the past. Whether or not she’s succeeded in her mission, she’ll never find out.

She closes her eyes and thinks of Ada’s face, her smile. She wants it to be the last thing she sees before she ceases to exist.

* * *

Someone knocks, loudly and insistently, on the office door. Hecate raises her eyebrows at the impropriety, but Ada, still overflowing with cheer after her reinstatement, just calls an indulgent “come in!”

Enid Nightshade flings herself into the room. ‘Miss Cackle!’ she says. ‘It’s very important that you go to the topmost turret, right now.’

Some Halloween prank, probably, Hecate thinks. Much too frivolous to be wasting Ada’s precious time with. But… Enid is panting, and her eyes are wide. And Hecate has a sudden feeling that whatever this is, it’s serious.

‘Ada, I think we should investigate,’ she says.

She meets her eyes. Ada nods. ‘All right.’

It’s all very peculiar. Mildred’s full of some story about how Hecate herself told her to protect the stone, which is impossible as she was in the office with Ada at the time, but there’s no denying that there the stone is, right where it shouldn’t be. Nobody seems able to explain how it got there, but there’s no harm done, and even Hecate can see that Mildred and Enid are as genuinely confused as she and Ada are. It’s all a bit of a mess, but it’s sorted out and the stone is back in its rightful place with nobody the wiser, in plenty of time for the Halloween festivities to go ahead as planned.

Ada’s so giddily relieved after all the events of the last few weeks that she throws herself into the party, and Hecate, although she doesn’t entirely approve of these modern sorts of celebrations, can’t help but enjoy watching Ada having fun with the girls. 

Much later, they help each other undress, and Hecate hangs up their ceremonial robes neatly while Ada brushes her teeth.

Hecate’s not sure why, but she feels the need to be close to Ada. When they climb into bed she snuggles up, wraps her arms around Ada, nose against her shoulder to breathe her in.

‘What’s all this?’ Ada teases. Hecate’s not normally this cuddly.

‘I don’t know,’ Hecate says. ‘I just… wanted to be near you tonight.’

Ada makes a pleased noise, laces her fingers with Hecate’s against her stomach. In a few minutes she’s asleep. 

Hecate listens to her breathing, matches it with her own, until she drifts off.

**Author's Note:**

> It didn't seem necessary to mention it in the body of the fic, but in case anyone's concerned, the next day Hecate and Ada sit down and get to grips with the business of Miss Mould's fake references, the truth comes out, Miss Mould is dismissed, she spends some time grappling with the things she's learned at Cackle's and figuring herself out, with the help of Mildred who keeps in touch, and eventually she becomes a legit art teacher at another school and is much happier.


End file.
